The devil's staircase for chip-firing on random graphs and on graphons

Abstract

We study the behavior of the activity of the parallel chip-firing upon increasing the number of chips on an Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi random graph. We show that in various situations the resulting activity diagrams converge to a devil's staircase as we increase the number of vertices. Our method is to generalize the parallel chip-firing to graphons, and to prove a continuity result for the activity. We also show that the activity of a chip configuration on a graphon does not necessarily exist, but it does exist for every chip configuration on a large class of graphons.